Write Down what you are Learning
If you don’t record what you learn, you have lost your competitive advantage. Knowing what you know is what can make the difference between a successful product and just another statistic. You have to be actively curious about what your users are doing and how to improve the experience for them.
In woodworking, there is this concept called a dry fit. This practice is where you take the pieces that you have lovingly created and fit them together without glue, nails or screws. You are testing to see if everything fits as it should and do you need to adjust anything. Inevitably you do, and the process of tweaking the parts till you have it right is what will help you build a great piece of furniture.
Your launch is a dry fit. You are testing what all the different parts are and do they work together. From this point on, you need to track what you learn and tweak what you have so that you can avoid repeating mistakes that don’t need to be repeated.
The key is documentation. Regardless of whether you are doing A/B testing, cohort testing, user feedback, whatever. You need to document what you are learning. Even if it’s as simple as “The customers hate the color orange in this market.” you’ll be able to avoid using orange in anything and pissing off your customers.
Ideally, you’re documenting this stuff so you can share it with your team. However, even as a lone wolf, it’s helpful to get into the habit of recording things because we can only keep so much in our heads. I recently brushed off some code that was two years old, and I couldn’t remember what went where. But I had left myself clues in the form of documentation to help me understand what I was doing and how I should do it, and most importantly, WHY I was doing it.
Documentation can be as simple as writing in a product journal. Instead of a life journal, create a product journal, a small sketchbook that is devoted to that one product. Write down your dreams and the feedback you are getting. What you want to do next and how you want to track it.
Of course, in a team setting, you need something a bit more sophisticated. Google docs will do just fine. The notifications on Google docs can be handy when you are trying to track something over time. Each time the doc gets updated you get a message.
There are very sophisticated tools that are purpose-built for this as well. But I’m avoiding them for now because I want you to write things down. Even if it’s todos or GitHub issues that capture the feedback that prompted you to make the change you are making. You have to track your learning.
Without some documentation, you are doomed to repeat the mistakes that you’ve already made. You have better things to do.
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This is the from the archive of an ongoing series called Making Things That Matter. Each week I will send you an email with another step in the process of building products and launching ideas. Signup here to join the conversation.
